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Gemma Files

Spectral Evidence Kindle Edition

by Gemma Files (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

23 ratings

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For almost thirty years, Shirley Jackson Award-winning horror author Gemma Files has consistently served up tale after tale celebrating monstrosity in all its forms: the imperfect, the broken, the beautifully alien and the sadly familiar. Her characters make their own choices and take their own chances, slipping from darkness into deeper darkness yet never losing their humanity--not even when they're anything but.

An embittered blood-servant plots revenge against the vampires who own him; a little girl's best friend seeks to draw her into an ancient, forbidden realm; two monster-hunting sisters cross paths with an amoral holler-witch again and again, battling both mortal authorities and immortal predators. From the forgotten angels who built the cosmos to the reckless geniuses whose party drug unleashes a plague, madness, monsters and murder await at every turn. And in "The Speed of Pain," sequel to the International Horror Guild award-winning story "The Emperor's Old Bones," we find that even those who can live forever can't outrun their own crimes....

Following in the footsteps of her critically praised Kissing Carrion, The Worm in Every Heart and We Will All Go Down Together, this is the first of two new Gemma Files collections from Trepidatio Publishing, bringing together nine of her best stories from the past ten years. So whether you're returning to Files's dark dreamlands or visiting for the first time, we advise you to get ready to review the--

SPECTRAL EVIDENCE

Print length

177 pages
Language

English
Publication date

February 21, 2018
File size

513 KB
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Gemma Files
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B079ZC2V3L
Publisher ‏ : ‎ JournalStone - Trepidatio Publishing (February 21, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 21, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 513 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 177 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #1,230,190 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,638 in Horror Short Stories
- #19,757 in Single Authors Short Stories
- #29,283 in Short Stories (Books)

Customer Reviews:
23 ratings

About the author

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Gemma Files

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Born April 4, 1968, in London, England, Gemma Files is the child of two actors (Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files), and has lived most of her life in Toronto, Canada. Previously best-known as a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, she first broke onto the horror scene when her short story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the International Horror Guild's 1999 award for Best Short Fiction. Her current bibliography includes two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series (CZP), was published in April 2010. The trilogy is now complete, including sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), and she is hard at work on her first stand-alone novel. Files is married to fellow author Stephen J. Barringer, with whom she co-wrote the story "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" for Clockwork Phoenix 2 (Norilana Books). They have one son.

Customer reviews

5 star		71%
4 star		22%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star		7%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Catherine J. Cole

Original and Powerful

Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2019

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This collection has interesting topics, original twits to some horror tropes; clear, believable voices for endearing, complex, multi-faceted characters; atmospheric, sensory settings, and description so vivid it gets under your skin.
Intrigue, adventure, sensuality, and deep-seeded chills. What more can you ask from a horror collection? This puppeteer of dark dreams has done it again.

2 people found this helpful

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William E. Woodcock, Jr.

loved it

Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

What’s better than discovering a fantastically talented writer? Finding a fantastically talented weird fiction writer who has already written several books all which you can download and voilà! you can look forward to at least a month’s worth of great reads. After I read Spectral Evidence, Gemma Files joined Laird Barron and Livia Llewelyn as one of my top three favorite horror writers.

2 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Great stories

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2018

Verified Purchase

I loved revisiting some of the characters from her previous collections. I’ve enjoyed all her work, and for me, anything by Ms. Files is always a sure bet. Can’t wait to read what’s next.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Supernatural horror derived from belief systems outside of the mainstream.

Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2019

Verified Purchase

The author gets us to suspend disbelief. Gee, stuff like this just might happen!

2 people found this helpful

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Eddie Generous

This collection is the business

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2018

Unnerving Magazine Review
I’d read a handful of Gemma Files' shorts before, as well as her incredible novel, Experimental Film. This collection gets its title, Spectral Evidence, from a short collected here. Oddly enough, as much as I’ve enjoyed most of what I’ve read before by Gemma Files, the first story I’d ever read by her was Spectral Evidence and I didn’t like it. I’ve said it before, puzzle piece stories offered up in parts of a larger whole do nothing for me.
That one dislike out of the way, this collection is the business.
Gemma Files has a way with her characters they're blunt and cruel at times, childish and evil at others. She reads a bit like a female version of Clive Barker, and I mean that in the fact that the characters are primarily women rather than primarily men. I also mean it’s loaded with the kind of sex deemed filthy in the atomic household sense. Easy sex. Sex for trade. It’s not erotic, more like a task that needs done, but never does the notion of foul come into play, sex here is going out for burgers. Aside from that, there’s also the body magic, which is a Barker regular, and Gemma Files uses it wonderfully. Characters have levels of oddity and powers written into their DNA, inked into their pores.
The stories here touch much on deceit and witchcraft. There’s a set of recurring characters that revel in these two points and are so grey and imperfect, it’s not always clear who you should be rooting for.
As it nearly always is, I didn’t like every story, but it was close (really probably all but the title tale), and a few were fantastic. Gemma Files writes with a literary edge set onto storylines that are commercially active, there’s beauty and disgust, blood and heartbreak, there is dread and there are thrills, there is fun and there is pain. Spectral Evidence as a collection is roundly very good and leaning towards great, all sorts of fun and it’s not often you get to say that about a horror collection.

4 people found this helpful

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oftenevil

When it comes to reviewing books online the best way to make your point is to compare authors...

Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2018

Continuing the statement from my headline above, (and while I don’t think this is a perfect approach on my part, I do believe it gets the important points across to any prospective customers/readers of the insanely talented Gemma Files):

So, for those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few decades & are unfamiliar with Gemma Files’s style — as well as those newcomers in the back, I see you, thanks for coming — let me shed some light on what to expect with most short stories by Gemma Files you will have the luxury to experience for the first time if you decide to grab this Force majeuere of a single author short story collection.

You see, for me, Gemma Files was my gateway-author for this generation’s weird fiction/occult horror resurgence. It was actually her work that somehow caught my eye & I immediately knew within a few weeks of reading the works of authors cut from the same cloth as her that I had been missing out, big time. Let’s just get down to the poin though, AND I’M REALLY ASKING ANYONE TO COMMENT BELOW IF THEY HAVE A BETTER ANSWER THAN MY OPINION THAT GEMMA FILES SO CONSISTENTLY GREAT WITH HER WORK THAT YOU MIGHT AS WELL GIVE HER AN EYE PATCH & SEVERAL FERAL - yet loyal - ALASKAN WOLVES AS PETS: because she’s the female Laird Barron in terms of genre quality.

I do kind of have myself for making that statement because gender shouldn’t play a part, I was just trying stare the truth, which is the fact that Laird Barron is the only other author working these days who has such a hardcore following that was earned with each sentence published in his several award winning collections & acclaimed novels. If you had to pick an author who can break your sleep cycle in a 15 pager short story with one try, the go to answer isn’t hard to find: Gemma Files.

Don’t even get my started on her novel Experimental Film, as I’m an armchair film junkie myself & that novel was had substance & style for days + originality to the nines, all culminating in a novel that is as potent nightmare fuel as John Langan’s The Fisherman or Adam Nevill’s The Ritual.

Cheers

One person found this helpful

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Lyndsay Johnson

This collection was flippin' amazing! I'm definitely now a fan

Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2018

My god, how did I not know about Gemma Files?! This collection was flippin' amazing! I'm definitely now a fan. She needs to become a horror household name, like Barker, Rice, or King!! These stories are sharp, imaginative, well-structured, dark, and terribly entertaining. My favorite tale was "A Wish From a Bone," a cosmic horror that draws on Sumerian mythology and cryptoarchaeology (right up my alley!). The whole collection is brilliant. Highest recommendation from me. Can't wait to read more from her.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

screamingdaisies

Genre-splicing masterpieces

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

So many classic tropes not only reinvented but turned on their heads, satisfyingly flipped and never going in the direction you'd expect. Gemma Files is a real pro and you can guarantee you're in safe hands with her writing. Not a single disappointing story in the bunch!

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